Pragmatic Analysis Of English Business Correspondence

In the process of globalization, interaction between China and foreign countries is becoming unprecedentedly frequent. And in the course of association with the foreigners, as a vehicle of international business transaction, English business correspondence is widely used in our daily life and routine duties, especially in the profession of public relations, information, to express ideas, to exchange feelings and to deal with social business. Therefore, it is necessary for people who are engaged in foreign affairs to have a good command of the language features and writing techniques about English business correspondence.Although, English business correspondence is very common and essential in the international trade, the research of business English is very limited. Business English did not arouse linguists' interest until 1960s. It was the late 1960s and early 1970s which saw the greatest expansion of research into the nature of particular varieties of English. Pragmatic researchers investigated the linguistic features of business letters from their perspectives. Cooperation and politeness are two essential components of effective business correspondence. It is supposed that the two interactants of a business letter, namely the writer and the reader, are cooperative enough to provide sufficient information by observing the rule which is called Cooperative Principles (CP) by Grice. However, mere cooperation is far from enough to reach the communicative goals in business letter writing. Politeness is one of the most important motivating factors for choosing what kind of language which should be used and what kind of approaches which should be adopted to arrange the letter. It accounts for most of the deliberate use of certain structures, organizations and selections of specific linguistic forms in business letter writing. In this article, Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle (PP) are the representative pragmatic principles the author is going to state.English business correspondence does not call for flowery language because it isn't literary works, but it is required to express the writer's own views accurately in a plain language that is very clear and is readily understood, and to catch the reader's attention and to persuade them to believe what you say.This thesis aims at analyzing English business correspondence from the perspective of pragmatics. Basing on the theories of CP and PP, the author wants to tell people the complementarities of CP and PP applied in English business correspondence. First, it starts from the introduction to the English business correspondence, talking about the definition, nature, classification and functions of English business correspondence. In the following, it introduces the basic theory of pragmatics---CP and PP, and explains maxims of cooperative principle and maxims of politeness principle. In the third part of this thesis, it introduces the features of English business correspondence, and explains the maxims of CP and PP embodied in English business correspondence according to the features. And then talks about the applications of CP and PP in different types of English business correspondence. At last, the author introduces some writing strategies to help readers write English business correspondence appropriately.This thesis tries to reveal many linguistic features of different business correspondences on the basis of theories of pragmatics, aiming to tell the businessmen how to write English business correspondence properly, furthermore, making the business communication fulfilled smoothly and even doing well to the business transaction among our country and foreign countries.